Books, Design and Culture
It’s just been announced that Haruki Murakami’s next novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, will be published on August 12th in the UK and US by Harvill Secker and A. A. Knopf respectively. The cover of the US edition is above, the UK edition below.
‘Haruki Murakami Bingo’ by Grant Snider for the New York Times Book Review. Well played, sir.
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A busy week for John Gall, Art Director at Anchor/Vintage: he unveiled a beautiful new website, and his design for the paperback boxed set of 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami (pictured above). My Q & A with John is here.
Los Angeles Review of Books also has a swanky new website.
Let’s Not Get Carried Away — Harvard professor Ann Blair, author of Too Much To Know, on the history of information at The Browser:
“Reading” covers a wide range of practices. Medieval scholasticism, for example, favoured a ponderous kind of reading of difficult Latin texts done by a few qualified scholars with pen in hand to comment on them. This kind of reading typically took place in a library or study with access to many other learned books. Novel reading was very different when it developed, especially in the 18th century – novels were viewed as engrossing and escapist entertainment, which was typically enjoyed in a nice comfy chair. Interestingly, this kind of reading, which we try to encourage in our children today, worried people in the 18th century. Wouldn’t girls especially get carried away by flights of fancy? People thought it important to control reading. For instance, it was considered better to have girls read in a circulating library since a public setting imposed limits on how far they could get carried away. So some of the fears parents have today about kids playing video games used to apply to reading.
And finally…
Howard Jacobson on Wisden’s Cricketer’s Almanack for the Independent:
Comments closedWhat a wonderful thing is Wisden, that lovely, lozengy, yellow-jacketed, Bible-shaped and Bible-weighted cricketers’ almanack, 1,500 pages deep, in which the averages of batsmen and bowlers and wicketkeepers, English and not-English, male and female, living and dead, are collated with a mystic punctiliousness that proves beyond argument the existence of God. You want to see the Divine Watchmaker at work on the mathematics of life? Then read Wisden.
A stunning new cover for James Joyce’s The Dubliners by German designer Apfel Zet (which reminds me — in a good way — of Tony Meeuwissen’s Woodbine-inspired cover for Billy Liar published by Penguin in the 1970’s).
Consistent Forms of Hostility — With an exhibition opening in May at the Barbican in London, Rowan Moore looks at the enduring influence the Bauhaus school at The Guardian:
Not much united Walter Ulbricht, the Stalinist dictator of East Germany for two decades, and Tom Wolfe, celebrant of the splendours and follies of American capitalist excess. Not much, except a loathing of the Bauhaus and the style of design it inspired. Ulbricht called it “an expression of cosmopolitan building” that was “hostile to the people” and to “the national architectural heritage”. Wolfe called it “an architecture whose tenets prohibit every manifestation of exuberance, power, empire, grandeur or even high spirits and playfulness”.
For Ulbricht it was alien to Germany, for Wolfe it was alien to America. Both agreed that it was placeless, soulless and indifferent to ordinary people’s needs. And if the Bauhaus attracted such consistent forms of hostility, that is due to the power and coherence of the image it presented to the world, of disciplined and monochrome modernist simplicity, usually involving steel and glass.
Translators Jay Rubin and J. Philip Gabriel talk about translating Haruki Murakami into English at the SF Bay Guardian.
And finally…
A Very American Critic — Elaine Showalter on film critic Pauline Kael at the TLS:
Cosmopolitan in her reading, sophisticated about international cinema, and au courant with theories of the auteur, Kael was nonetheless a very American critic. She was forty-seven before she ever travelled to Europe, and from the very beginning, she used her reviews and essays to explore what it meant to write film criticism in the United States, where the movies were always a compromise between art and commerce. “The film critic in the United States”, she wrote in “Movies, the Desperate Art” (1959), “is in a curious position; the greater his interest in the film medium, the more enraged and negative he can sound”. American film critics risked the temptations of selling out to Hollywood, or expressing contempt for mass market films. Kael prided herself on both her knowledge of the film medium and her deep love for the movies, trashy and avant-garde alike. Movies, she wrote in “The Function of a Critic” (1966), “are one of the few arts (along with jazz and popular music) Americans can respond to without cultural anxieties”. She did not intend to condescend to her readers or tell them that their tastes were wrong.
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Book Sniffing — Six writers on their book collecting habits, including Gary Shteyngart:
I’m big on sniffing books. The old Soviet ones really have this strong smell, reminding me, for some reason, of tomato soup in a cheap Soviet cafeteria.
Fear of a Blank Canvas — Book designer Chip Kidd interviewed at Azure Magazine:
If I’m designing a book for myself, that’s a very different thing than if I’m designing a book for Murakami – he’s ultimately the boss. For 1Q84, what I’m really trying to do, as pretentious as it sounds, is to create a work of art that services a greater work of art. It’s him. It’s not about me. But at the same time, I want to make something great for him. If I’m designing something for myself, it can be liberating and potentially stifling at the same time. It’s the literary equivalent of being given a blank canvas. And I’m not a great blank canvas kind of guy. I want the canvas filled in, in terms of content, by Murakami, and then I can make it look like something.
See also: Book designers Lauren Duffy, Kimberly Glyder, Henry Sene Yee and David Drummond on the ins-outs of book design at The Book Deal.
The Incommunicability of Difference — David Bellos discusses translation and his new book Is That A Fish In Your Ear? on Talk of the Nation:
For translation to exist, you have to accept the fact that languages are all different and they don’t describe the world in quite the same way. You also have to accept that languages are all the same in that anything you can say in one language can be said in any other. And it seems to me [that the] tension between the incommunicability of difference and … the sharing of a common set of messages and meanings is … human. I mean, we all live in that state, that I am not like you. My experience is not directly commensurable with yours, and yet, for us to get on and to be human and to be in a society, we have to also make the assumption that in another dimension, we’re all the same. We have the same needs, the same fears, the same desires.”
And finally…
James Parker on George Smiley, John le Carré’s literary spy, and why he is the antithesis of James Bond at The Atlantic:
Comments closedBureaucratically dowdy, rarely spotted in the field, a dull fucker by both instinct and training, Smiley drops no one-liners, romances no tarot-card readers, roars no speedboats through the Bayou… When John le Carré dies, there will be no pseudo–le Carrés, rotating the clichés of Smileydom through their potboilers. Not only is le Carré more or less inimitable—less imitable, certainly, than Ian Fleming, whose style was essentially that of a school bully with a typewriter—but Smiley himself is too elusive a creature to be captured by any pen other than that of his creator.
In an interview for the New Yorker, Haruki Murakami’s longtime translator Jay Rubin talks about the work of the Japanese author (whose new book 1Q84 has just been published) and his own work as a translator:
New Yorker Outloud: Translating Murakami mp3
The New Yorker also published a Murakami short story, Town of Cats, translated by Rubin, in September.
Comments closedAssociate art director Chip Kidd talks about designing the cover and interior artwork for Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84:
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Oh. My. Gosh — Jon Klassen’s lovely illustrations and designs for the movie adaptation of Coraline.
Schadenfreude — Literary agent Nathan Bransford on the “death” of the publishing business:
There are definitely problems with the business… But the industry is not stupid. Like any massive industry that is comprised of tens of thousands of individuals, it is a human institution with some institutional problems and weaknesses. But despite a reading public whose appetite for books is not growing at a particularly fast rate, despite tremendous competition from other media, we’re still here, and we’re doing way better than a lot of industries, including ones comprised of supposed geniuses and masters of the universe.
Japan’s 21st Century Cultural Ambassador — Roland Kelts, author of Japanamerica, profiles Haruki Murakami for 3:AM Magazine.
Isolating the Commonplace — The New York Times Book Review‘s photography editor Jeffery Scales discusses the William Eggleston photograph used illustrate Edmund White’s review of Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by (the improbably — yet charmingly — named) Wells Tower.
Give me Twitter or give me death — The Globe and Mail‘s Ian Brown possibly overthinks things…
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